Developing vocational education is a necessity for the economic and social development of high-poverty areas in China. But vocational education in impoverished areas lacks social recognition and faces funding shortages, along with difficulties in recruiting students. Vocational high schools themselves also have shortcomings. This article considers…

Politics, economics, and technology have conspired to make this an exceptionally challenging time for American higher education. Some critics claim that costs are out of control in traditional public and private nonprofit higher education. They believe these institutions will soon go the way of the railroads as for-profit institutions displace…

This document presents the proceedings of the 17th Annual Research Forum held June 29, 2012, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Included herein are the following 25 action research papers: (1) "Reading and Writing": A Study Comparing the Strengths of Peer Review and Visible Author Writing Strategies (Elizabeth Behar); (2)…

In this dissertation, I study economics textbook markets as an example of durable goods monopoly. Textbooks are protected by copyrights, and from a student's point of view, different textbooks are not good substitutes because students wish to use the textbook adopted by their instructors. Therefore sellers have market power. Textbooks can be…

School improvement programs that work in some places don't work in others. School improvement programs that work with some students don't work with others. Programs that appear to have positive effects in the hands of some teachers don't work for other teachers. If we can't be confident that a program will travel well, from one…

General economic uncertainty and ongoing issues with information technology (IT) funding in higher education are impacting the general availability and allocation of funds to community colleges and, subsequently, to IT. However, financial support for IT is not always just about money: how much and to whom, from what source for what purpose. Other…

Copyright is essential to a diverse and rich culture. Yet the platform--the technology--through which individuals get access to their culture has changed radically. The existing system of copyright thus cannot work in the digital age and needs also to be changed, radically. In this article, the author shares three observations on the way to…

Recent state and national policy has both reflected and helped to further an image of localities as parochial, reactionary, ineffective, and appropriately marginalized in the enterprise of school reform. Growing state and national roles (on one hand) and growing market and private sector inroads (on another) have the potential to undermine…

Theorists agree that the risk of folding changes as organizations age, but there is little consensus as to the general form or generative processes of age-dependent mortality. This article investigates four such processes (maturation, senescence, legitimation and obsolescence), which have been taken as competing accounts. Using two analytical…

Simple measurements of the decay time of cathodoluminescence are described. Cathodoluminescence is used in many devices, including computer monitors, oscilloscopes, radar displays and television tubes. The experimental setup is simple and easy to build. Two oscilloscopes, a function generator, and a fast photodiode are needed for the experiments.…

Manuscripts, archives, and early printed books contain a documentary record of the foundations of human knowledge. Many elements restrict access to this corpus, from preservation concerns to censorship. On the assumption that the widespread availability of knowledge benefits the human condition more than the restriction of knowledge, elements…

People expected technology educators to be well informed about current events in all areas of technology. As it turns out, they often turn to them for advice outside their subject areas. High-definition television (HDTV) may be such a subject for many of them. In this article, the author provides some information on high-definition television and…

Technology brought the writing center to life because of the word processor, but new technology is actually going to create robotic life that thinks with us, for us, to us. It will offer portability all from a microchip stored in a coat pocket. Technology will continue to expedite today's hurry up world, and this will carry over into the writer's…

In the 1970s, the movement to the metric system (which has still not completely occurred in the United States) and the advent of hand-held calculators led some to speculate that decimal representation of numbers would render fractions obsolete. This provocative proposition stimulated Zalman Usiskin to write "The Future of Fractions" in 1979. He…

Usiskin takes another look at fractions, years after writing the article "The Future of Fractions" for "Arithmetic Teacher".